James Thornton is founding Executive Director of The Heffter Research Institute, an international neuroscience center based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Zurich, Switzerland, and with programs at Harvard and UCLA. The Institute is a world leader in studying the brain, mind, and consciousness, and the world's only neuroscience institute that focuses on psychotropic molecules.

An environmental lawyer for many years, he is considered one of the twentieth century's great environmental advocates. He founded the Los Angeles Office of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The office is a consistent source of nationally and internationally important environmental legal work; Thornton's work on protecting California coastal habitat has been cited by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as the model for complex multi-species protection plans.

Thornton is a certified Zen teacher in the Soto lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi, with whom he trained for ten years at the Los Angeles Zen Center. He is also authorized to teach in the Hindu tradition. His teachers Maezumi Roshi, the Dalai Lama and Mother Meera have all asked him to create and teach a form of practice that unites people with the Earth.

He graduated from Yale University phi beta kappa, magna cum laude, with top honors in philosophy, and from New York University School of Law, where he was Editor in Chief of the Law Review. He clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and was an attorney with the New York Firm of Paul, Weiss, Rikfind, Wharton & Garrison before becoming a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and founder of its Los Angeles Office.

He served as Professor of Law (adjunct) at New York University School of Law, and at The City University of New York School of Law.

He is the author of numerous articles. His book, A Field Guide to the Soul: A Down to Earth Handbook of Spiritual Practice, was published by Random House/Bell Tower in February 1999, and the paperback edition appeared in March 2000.

He is a dab hand at television, radio, and print interviews, at public speaking, at courtroom and congressional advocacy, and at leading seminars, workshops, and retreats.

He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the French Pyrenees.